COPENHAGEN: A 39-year-old Polish man was jailed for 12 days on Saturday for an attack on Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.
Frederiksen suffered minor whiplash in the attack, when a man walked and hit the politician in the square in central Copenhagen.
“Thank you for the many, many congratulations and support. It is very touching,” Prime Minister Ritzau told reporters in a written statement on Saturday.
“I’m sad and shaken by the episode, but otherwise safe. I need some rest for once. For body and soul. I need to be with my family and be a little bit by myself,” said Frederiksen.
Several European Union leaders condemned the attack, three weeks after Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was critically wounded in an assassination attempt.
“This is an unacceptable attack on our open, democratic society,” Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stere told NTB about Frederiksen’s attack.
“There is no indication of a political motive,” the man’s lawyer told a Copenhagen court on Saturday. The incident took place two days before Danes participated in the European Union elections.
“The Danish authorities said that the arrested person is a Polish citizen who has been living in Denmark for a long time,” a spokesman for the Polish Foreign Ministry was quoted as saying by Polish state radio.
“We see this as a single spontaneous act, and in our current investigation there is no hypothesis to suggest that it was a planned attack against the prime minister,” .
An official event scheduled for Saturday by the Danish prime minister has been canceled, his office said.
Frederiksen was able to leave after the attack, Soren Kjergaard, a local coffee farmer, told Reuters after seeing security escort him.
A month ago, three German politicians were attacked before the European Parliament and district council elections, and more were attacked earlier this week.
